Today, maintaining a WordPress website provides a popular way for an Atlanta Area enterprise to market goods and services online. Creating an attractive, easily navigated site does not require a huge expense. Many businesses discover this software enables them to project a highly cost-effective online presence.
What type of costs should a site owner anticipate, in addition to ongoing website support expenses? Considerable variability enters into this calculation:
Basic Costs
The WordPress.org website offers basic WordPress software free of charge. Thus, site owners enjoy a great opportunity to experiment creating websites without an extensive capital investment. The scalability of the available software remains an important advantage.
This consideration likely contributes to the popularity of WordPress as an online tool used by numerous nonprofits, blogs, and individuals. For commercial purposes, site owners usually utilize software sold by the WordPress.com website. It costs under $100, and represents a far less expensive option than many competing products.
Additional Options
Presenting a commercial website does involve some ongoing, recurring expenses:
A Unique Domain Name
In order to maintain a commercial online presence, companies with websites typically prefer to obtain a unique domain name. Today, this type of URL constitutes a de facto business requirement for most Atlanta Area enterprises. The cost of purchasing or leasing a unique domain name varies, but may require an investment under $30 annually.
Web Hosting Services
Unless a business chooses to maintain and host its own servers, the company will require a web hosting service. These packages vary widely in price. They typically involve a monthly or quarterly charge ranging from minimal hosting services for under $20 a month to thousands of dollars a month. Some web hosting firms also furnish built-in WordPress support services. Today, many hosting companies offer cloud-based options.
Technical Support Services
Although support services prove optional, from a practical standpoint business website owners absolutely require this type of assistance for their sites. Some companies choose to maintain WordPress websites using full-time in-house IT support specialists. Others rely upon technical support packages available through hosting services.
The level of assistance may vary from maintaining WordPress sites in a current, secure and updated form to furnishing daily backup services to offering support for social media and online public relations campaigns to providing help desk services. Entrepreneurs discover wide latitude in terms of the technical support options available to help them maintain commercial websites.
Additional Important Support Services
In addition to domain name and web hosting fees, businesses also frequently utilize other services to promote and protect their sites. Not every site uses all of these types of assistance. Some of these ancillary services include:
Fulfillment Centers
Today, many online merchants rely extensively upon third party fulfillment centers to process financial transactions and/or handle product shipping and distribution.
Commercial Security
In some cases, website owners utilize specific commercial security services, either in-house or on a consultative basis. Adding this service offers additional protection for websites against numerous online threats (a list that includes hacking, viruses, malware, ransomware and social engineering threats).
Testing Services
Some commercial websites routinely utilize third party testing services to assist with issues such as navigability and web page loading speeds.
Impressive Scalability
Essentially, most of the costs associated with maintaining a fashionable site prove optional. Many site owners begin with a modest investment, and then expand as their available budgets grow.
